Friday, 30 December 2011

Hazard

Hazard taught high school in East Lansing (1952-55) to finance his Ph.D. in American Civilization. Motivated by reading McLuhan in graduate school, he assigned new TV playwrights like Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling to his tenth graders and Maurice Evans as Macbeth to his twelfth graders.

When Michigan State opened a TV channel, his students aired a program on teenage leisure."Everyman Is a Critic" there each week. This led to a Ford Foundation grant in New York to deploy national resources for English teachers confronting the new medium of television. He became radio-TV editor of "Scholastic Teacher" and schmoozed with Marshall McLuhan, that year a visiting professor at TC, Columbia. A talk at the 4C's convention on "The Future of Cultural Criticism" led to his first college job at Trenton State(1956-57)where he finished his dissertation.

In 1957 Penn awarded him a Carnegie Postdoctoral grant to create a new course on Mass Culture, after which he became Gilbert Seldes' gofer in the founding of the Annenberg School where he taught media history.In !960 he was appointed the first director of the Institute of American Studies at the newly created East-West Center.

He quit after one year when he discovered his No.2 had been in the CIA for the last ten years. He became English chair and full professor at Arcadia University in 1961 where he devised an International English curriculum, teaching in their London program. His involvement in secular media is summarized on the website of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (www.broadstreetreview.com) under the rubric "Hazard in Luceland".

When his mother died in 1982, he resigned on Walt Whitman's birthday to become a roving international alternative journalist, using an inheritance to explore all the continents but Antarctica (brrr!) to deepen his control of International English as the humanities curriculum of the future. He has continued this quest in Weimar, where the spirit of Goethe energizes his quest. (G lived at Seifengasse 1, Hazard at 10.)